Australia
-
Mr Porter’s Problem
Thursday, Mar. 4, 2021 It’s not that he’s an entitled brat who’s never properly grown up. It isn’t that he counts himself among a group of Liberal politicians who style themselves The Swinging Dicks (a tip, fellas: buy better underwear). It isn’t that, as a consequence of his all-too-common adolescent male fantasy, he’s in that Continue reading
-
The God Squad Has the Crayon
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021 Other people’s fairy stories have never bothered me. We’re all entitled to a little fantasy. It’s polite, too, to keep one’s own counsel on the sublime veracities that other people like to claim illuminate the liturgies with which humankind’s need for fiction has underpinned their lives. It is no moment, to Continue reading
-
Here’s Mud in Your Boots! Cheers!
Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021 This week we will be marking our first Australia Day in country in fifteen years. Throughout the decade and a half that preceded April 2, 2020, when we were FIFOing as a lifestyle, we always managed to be absent for the rounds of increasingly strident and mawkish flag-waving and gong-giving that Continue reading
-
Tracking down the Morons
Kealy, Western Australia Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020 We’re getting to know our new home area better, now that the temperatures are generally up a degree or two on deep midwinter and the rain, while still frequent and chill to the skin, is more likely to be in the form of showers and thus is relatively Continue reading
-
Officially an Elderly Obstruction
THE CAGE Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019 My diary noted today that 2019 had now produced 12 rabbits and that our household – that comfortably mannered and predominantly civil paradigm that is not quite entirely virtual since wherever it has been it has always had some physical form – has been smoke-free Continue reading
-
How High Can Everest Rise?
This appears in Quadrant magazine’s November 2019 issue, just out. The Dizzying Heights Ross Fitzgerald and Ian McFadyen ISBN No: 978-1-925736-30-4 Hybrid Publishing : Melbourne pp. 248, $24.99. Review by Richard Laidlaw It’s plainly very difficult being a political satirist these days, when the politicians seem to have cornered the market themselves and to have Continue reading
-
Let Him Eat Cake
RICHARD LAIDLAW Book Review IT must be very difficult being a political satirist these days. So many politicians, to a man and woman, get underfoot with plots that would outdo a Goon Show episode and leave their writers wringing their hands in frustration: Why couldn’t we think of that? So we owe a deep Continue reading
-
A Bitter Blow
HECTOR’S DIARY Snippets from his regular diet of worms THE CAGE Bali Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018 THE second Lombok earthquake, on Sunday evening (Aug. 5), was far worse than its immediate predecessor (Jul. 29), and as finally calculated at seven on the Richter scale the biggest in this area in quite some Continue reading
-
The Bludge Report
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms VASSE, Western Australia Monday, Jul. 2, 2018 WE are, we’ve told friends, having a bit of a bludge. One of them very kindly said we deserved to do this. Many others, perhaps, just shrugged, Atlas-like or otherwise. Some others among them may have Continue reading
-
The Doolally Squad
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms The Cage, Bali Sunday, May 20, 2018 IT’S hard to know what to write about the Surabaya bombings. Doubtless there are those who would advise against writing anything about them. But that won’t do. Perhaps we could start by saying that at least Continue reading
8º of latitude 